A primer on the opening world of on line multimedia cultural heritage. A vision of present opportunities for digital content aggregators.

1. A window of opportunity
for cultural heritage aggregators
A primer on the opening world of on line multimedia cultural heritage
Rome, January 2011
© alessandro dionisi vici
integrazione di filiere industriali

2. A window of opportunity for cultural heritage aggregators
Marco Polo had a unique opportunity to travel from Venice to China in reasonably safe
conditions: the Mongol Khans kept the silk road open from end to end to commerce,
diplomacy, express couriers and even cultural, religious and social exchange. Today
people can already tour the rich cultural heritage land of books, paintings, pictures and
audio/video archives offered by publishers who feed the Europeana platform. As
happened to Marco Polo, government and private publishers have a unique opportunity to
make digital European cultural heritage travel on a platform providing standards and
services keeping open to all users the networks of multimedia digital libraries.
Why is Europeana opening a window of opportunity? First the free platform results form a
joint major effort of cultural institutions, funded by the European Community since 2005
and building on previous initiatives. Second, its active members work on topics, made
complex by technical heterogeneity and cultural boundaries, with highly qualified teams of
experts who take balanced decisions on feasibility and user acceptance of each platform
feature. Finally, the business model of the initiative is open-ended, including the
participation of the original sources of digitalized contents, as well as the added value of
aggregators of cultural contents from multiple sources. Europeana opens a window of
opportunity in particular for government organizations and commercial publishers acting as
aggregators, to whom currently provides a well defined process, robust technology and
skilled teams capable to withstand overseas initiatives of similar scope.
A seamless journey across cultural boundaries
The experience of surfing the web searching for cultural objects brings us inside
museums, exhibitions, collections, libraries; but before finding a specific site or portal we
first use a search engine. One museum site could describe just the museum name or the
name of a particular collection, another could describe some of its masterpieces. In short,
if each site describes its digitized contents in a different style it creates an obstacle and
typically a search engine would only find a part of what we seek.
Standardizing descriptive information (also called “metadata”) enables to reach all the
digital contents in a seamless way. If a museum did not adopt the standard in his portal, an
aggregator can do so by mapping and feeding the standard descriptions to Europeana,
together with the links to the digital objects. So, if a person or a family would like to journey
Europe, they could begin with a start-up visit at the Europeana portal. They could start
visiting Europe on the web asking for what they like to see, beginning to browse in their
area of interest, preparing for a real tour. Beyond casual web surfers, the Europeana
browse and search capabilities have been devised and validated considering different
categories of end users, including students, experts and professionals, in order to
understand their specific needs. So, for example, a casual visitor would expect to search
and find a place or the name of something, while a student could specify a title, an author
or a subject and even refine search results by date, country, language, provider or
multimedia type. Experts make use of even more sophisticated concepts and relations
which will take advantage of “semantic web” technology.
All together, a seamless journey in the large network of European providers needs to cross
a number of boundaries, technical and cultural. Europeana architects worked on the
multiple goal to allow semantic interoperability, metadata exchange, shared functionality
and services.
© alessandro dionisi vici
integrazione di filiere industriali

3. Moving from the Europeana highway to new aggregators avenues
While feeding metadata and links from aggregators and content providers to Europeana
allows to reach digital objects from any source, when users move from the Europeana
portal to the original context of an art piece, they reach additional domain knowledge. One
aggregator can be a national institution, such as a government agency acting as a focal
point for all resources in its responsibility. Another aggregator could be an international
publisher specialized in archaeology or baroque music. Once the Europeana highway has
taken us to the topic of interest, we can visit the avenues reaching all the spots we wanted
with an additional range of valuable contents and services. Here public and private
organizations can compete in creativity to conquer their target users and customers,
considering that some cultural objects are free, but some may have an associated price.
Aggregators and content providers can display digital multimedia objects at different
quality levels, on different display devices, and also add knowledge and applications to
differentiate products and services.
Designing a successful portal for a cross domain, horizontal aggregator requires focusing
the target user communities, understanding their expectations, observing their behaviour
during search and browse, field testing each portal feature, including metadata quality,
ease of use, interface enhancements by short videos and virtual tours, links to social
networks, authoring applications. Only if the user finds interesting and fruitful his
experience the portal can be considered attractive.
The road to success for domain specific, vertical aggregators is more on the content side:
good publishers already have the best subject matter experts who write academic articles
to illustrate artwork, explain historical context, compare different authors and schools. On
the web, a skilled publisher can “reengineer” expert domain knowledge from paper to
taxonomies, ontologies, semantic maps to improve the effectiveness of user experience.
Starting an aggregator
Europeana had its first prototype ready in 2008 and in two years was able to give access
to approximately 15 million of digitized cultural heritage objects sourcing from thousands of
content providers. The stunning result was leveraged by the approach to delegate the task
of feeding metadata and links to aggregators. But how can an aggregator start, on which
grounds in his own context, and what is needed?
First one needs to assess the compatibility of his business mission with present and future
EU guidelines and policies, which strongly favour public domain. Europeana seeks a
“clean hands” attitude, according to which copyright issues are left to owners of the original
context of digital objects: Europeana standard metadata allow to specify the copyright
status of each digital object and its display, at owners discretion, can be based on a fee.
Aggregators should be also aware that joining Europeana is the preferred choice to access
public funding and that Europeana publishes a formal Agreement defining all contractual
obligations with aggregators and third parties, also publishing complete technical
guidelines and specifications.
The next assessment is size of the cultural heritage to aggregate and the distribution and
legal status of its owners, in order to choose a positioning” for the core business. Digitizing
today is a work in progress: the amount of cultural objects already digitized by national
libraries, local museums and government institutes is not small in each country. Therefore
aggregators, whose role towards Europeana is to align, map and feed metadata, start on
the grounds of policies and agreements with digital content providers. The amount of
© alessandro dionisi vici
integrazione di filiere industriali

4. digitized objects must be assessed together with the quality and heterogeneity of
metadata, which determine the amount of work needed for metadata normalization.
Aggregators have a role as well towards their intended user communities and markets. A
national aggregator has the mission to reach his citizens, at home and abroad, and to
reach other countries to foster cultural exchange, education, entertainment, tourism,
cooperation in industry and services. A commercial aggregator may be an editor, a
publisher, a broadcaster with one or many specialized market niches.
In both cases, aggregators act like brokers in a complex network including technical,
scientific, commercial partners: the processes, activities, services, deliverables must be
initially defined with each partner and flexibly evolved, negotiating roles, organizing
responsibilities, managing economic and service performance, choosing a technical
architecture for the whole “ecosystem”. With respect to existing cultural heritage portals,
often expression of local/regional initiatives, often separated by domain boundaries, it is
clear that an institutional aggregator has a great potential to rationalize resources via scale
economies, reorganize responsibilities, promote creativity and skill via competence centres
and, above every other concern, improve user satisfaction.
How does it all work
For aggregators a sustainable business must be based on realistic projections about
funding or revenue. Since funding is most difficult today, revenues should be explored as
well, also for public initiatives, with a strong focus on customer needs. As tourism and
education are important sources of revenues for countries with a rich cultural heritage,
aggregators can add to free basic access richer contents and better quality, such as virtual
tours, interactive learning, short videos, professional services based on well experimented
commercial approaches.
Multilanguage content can be coproduced with foreign partners. Content distribution is not
limited to on line consumers, since the digitization of semantically enriched artwork,
architecture, archaeology can also be commercially reused in the entertainment and
education industry. A sustainable business vision extends the supply and delivery network,
creating opportunities for synergies among countries, public and private sectors, central
and local institutions. A successful local experiment may easily extend abroad.
On the technical side, interoperability is needed among all partners in the ecosystem,
supporting backoffice and frontoffice production and operations processes as well as end-
user access to a multimedia portal. But interoperability is a complex issue and cannot be
reduced to technical integration, since it also involves exchange of metadata and shared
services on cultural objects holding a common meaning within all partners.
As a start metadata production processes (acquisition, editing, mapping, normalization,
and transfer) is executed by an experienced aggregator following Europeana guidelines.
User driven run time processes, as search and browsing, multimedia display/streaming,
security and copyrights handling depend on the aggregator role with respect to content
providers and its business vision of target users/customers.
One opportunity is to experiment with the same Europeana platform, available as open
source code, following present and future Europeana standards (Europeana Semantic
Elements, Europeana Data Model) and actively contributing to the evolution of new
functionality and service. The primary motivation for this choice is the quality of work and
of technical decisions embodied in the platform.
Complementary or alternatively one could choose other search methods and data base
technology or different user interaction paradigms more suitable to the aggregator role and
mission.
© alessandro dionisi vici
integrazione di filiere industriali